Hey people! As I see it, my blog here is pretty much dead (shame on me) and considering my tight schedule at the moment I’m thinking about bringing it offline permanently, replacing it by some static site that I’ll update now and then or redesigning it to purely serve as a personal site. I’ll let you know when I made up my mind… 😉

Personally the last one and a half year was exceptionally great: I finished the renovation of my apartment at the end of 2016 and in April 2017 my girlfriend finally moved in. We successfully merged both our cats and recently we bought some hens to get some fresh eggs now and then. 😀

Today I had a few minutes of spare time and uploaded the rest of the photos showing the renovation procedure and the end result. Of course we did some minor tweaks here and there in the meantime, but you’ll get the idea of what it looks like today.

No, I’m not dead. So… yes, you’ll get those Tntnet benchmarks eventually. There’s just a bunch of other stuff going on in my life lately and so I did not find time nor motivation to drive this any further. But it seems to get better now (staying positive helps a lot), so – yes, you’ll get those Tntnet benchmarks eventually. It may just take another two to three months. 🙂

On a side note I’m currently working on using the Linux BlueZ 5.x bluetooth stack via its D-Bus API. That’s some highly interesting stuff, even though the BlueZ D-Bus API documentation is vague at best (and I won’t even mention the state of the documentation for the C API). But fighting through all the docs and even the source code of BlueZ itself paid off in the end. The system I’m developing the software for is running quite stable and I’m proud to say that it passed all tests this week. Oh, yes, I did not use the low level D-Bus C API for this task of course. You may take a look at the D-Bus low level API reference documentation for the reason behind this decision. As I definitely did not want to “sign up for some pain”, I decided to use the Qt D-Bus high level bindings for this project. Everyone interested in communicating via D-Bus in their own (C++/Qt) applications really should try these out.

Being a fan of C++ and having a new Embedded Linux project in the pipeline, a colleague recently put my interest onto the small C++ based web server Tntnet. Tntnet essentially is a framework that allows to generate rich dynamic web applications using C++ and a model-view-controller approach – just like Rails (Ruby) or Django (Python). For this task Tntnet comes with a variety of tools: a sort of “meta compiler” that generates pure C++ code out of so-called “ecpp” files (which are a mixture of HTML and C++ code), the standalone web server executable and the Cxxtools C++ library that brings stuff like JSON / XML RPC, logging capabilities and much much more. Before hacking any code developers have two options to deploy a web application: either compiling the web stuff as shared library, which in turn can be loaded as a module by the standalone Tntnet executable, or compiling everything into a single application, which then serves as the web server providing the content. The latter case contains of a simple main() entry function in which the server is set up and configured. It may look like this:

Writing CMake scripts to search and use these tools and libraries merely took a few minutes and an hour later (reading my way through the documentation and Howtos on the official website) my first web application (a simple CRC32 Checksum calculator) compiled successfully. Due to its C++ nature the application has a really small footprint (~230 KB), serves http requests amazingly fast and hence seems like the ideal solution for our new project.

Sorry that I don’t have any more examples for now, but I will update you later with some stats (comparing Apache2 and Tntnet using the Apache2 Benchmark suite) and more code. So long and keep on hacking.

Welcome back to my updated private website. After years of spending almost no time to these pages, I now finally found some time to get them to a new level.

The first thing you may notice is the WordPress link on these pages – and people already using WordPress may notice that I’m still using the default Twenty Fourteen theme. So, yes, I’ve ported my website to WordPress and stopped telling myself that I will ever create my own Content Management System or Blog Engine. The reasons for this change seems quite obvious: it’s now way easier to add new posts and site management is much more flexible than it could ever have been with the old layout. Apart from that I recently set up another WordPress blog for my sister’s handicraft stuff and was quite impressed with the provided functionality and ease of configuration.

That said, I hope that I will finally be able to post more stuff on this website now. I may still tweak the layout and colors of the Twenty Fourteen theme as time passes by, but this will be done step by step as I find the time to do so.

So, what can you expect in the future? Well, I plan to post personal stuff, of course. But apart from that I also feel ready to post useful tips and tricks related to my passion (and coincidentally the things I do at my work): Software Engineering and Development. Currently I largely work on Embedded Linux platforms using C++ and the Qt libraries, so you may see posts regarding these topics in the near future. Currently this (Blog) site is still rather empty, but I think you’ll have fun with some content that’s already present (especially if you’re interested in gaming you may head over to the Downloads section ASAP 😉 ).